The Washington area badlands are a pretty freaky area of the country- and hard to comprehend the enormity of what must have happened.
My guess is a meteor hitting water, but not sure why it only affected Washington, unless it manages to hit some blocked up huge reservoir of water (but where was THAT stored..???)
My guess is a meteor hitting water, but not sure why it only affected Washington, unless it manages to hit some blocked up huge reservoir of water (but where was THAT stored..???)
I've heard that at the end of the last ice age there was a huge lake of melted water that was held back by an ice dam in Montana.
One day the ice dam broke and created the mother of all floods. The water was 500 feet deep when it came through the Portland area. Apparently this is one thing that created the Columbia Gorge.
Reading up a little on this, the current thinking of geologists is that there were multiple flood incidents like this which are called the Missoula Floods.